Beta 17 is available. Why “Leviathan”? This is a BIG release that has taken me a long time to get ready. It’s the result of many bug reports and lots of play testing.

Below are some of the highlights of this release. For a full list of the fixes and enhancements in this release, check out the what’s new page. Just give me the beta! If you just want the beta download, without all the discussion of what’s in it, go ahead and jump down to "How do I get the beta?"

Image Swap Fix

I think I’ve finally tracked down the source of the “Red X” (or the source of most of them). You’d sometimes see this in the chat window, sometimes when dealing with handouts, occasionally when changing backgrounds. The essence of the problem I found was in EpicTable’s “Image Swap”. EpicTable doesn’t make you wait for everything to be downloaded. It uses placeholder images (like the hourglass or the horned helm guy) while it downloads the missing images. When it downloads an image, it swaps it with the placeholder image. There was a race condition there, which made it possible that the placeholder would be disposed of before the new image was in place, and if the screen happened to get painted at that moment—BAM! Red X.

I can’t promise that the Red X is gone forever—it’s a generic response to memory issues. So, if you just plain ran out of memory, you’d get it too, and there’s not much I can do about that, aside from making sure EpicTable isn’t taking more memory than it has to. You should, however, see the red X become very rare.

Handout Sharing Fixes

Handouts had a couple problems: First off, they often failed to display correctly when first downloaded. The placeholder image was displayed, but then it wasn’t correctly replaced when the real image was downloaded. Second, handouts were sent to the players immediately when you added them to the handout gallery—before you’d even shared them. That made it impossible to load handouts before you wanted to show them to your players. That’s all fixed now. Handouts aren’t shared until you share them (which you can do by right clicking on them in the gallery and selecting “Share”).

Summing a Single Dice Pool

An issue with the dice builder is fixed. It had been the case that adding a sum to a single dice pool had no effect. It works fine now.

Map / Tabletop Token “Sync” Issues

Several people have reported issues with map/tabletop tokens becoming out of sync between players. I’ve resolved several issues that I believe account for many of the problems.

Resizing an object from the top or left

Resizing an object from the top or left was an because doing so actually moves the token (changes the position its upper-left corner). This side-effect of movement on a resize wasn’t accounted for previously, so after an object was resized in this way, its position was incorrect from the perspective of the other players.

Updating an object’s position via Format tab

Updating an object’s position from the Format tab wasn’t broadcast. That resulted in the updating participant having a different view of the object’s position than all the other participants.

Snap-to-Grid was improperly applied to incoming object moves

Snap-to-Grid was improperly applied to incoming object moves. Say I had snap-to-grid on and you had snap-to-grid off. Now, you move an object such that it doesn’t fall within a grid square. When that move broadcast to me, my EpicTable snaps it to grid, and now we’re out of sync with respect to this object.

Move by offset prevented self-correcting

Broadcasting object moves as offsets from their current positions kept them out of sync if anything bad happened. This wasn’t really a bug itself, but it kept the map/tabletop from being self-correcting.

Remaining issue with DPI settings

Just a word of warning: There’s still an issue with people in the same game using different DPI settings. If you change your default DPI settings in Windows, textures and objects render in the wrong positions. For instance, if you bump your DPI from 96 to 120, the rendering of all textures and objects will be about 20% off to the top and left.

Lock Objects

You can now “lock” objects on the tabletop or map. This prevents their being accidentally moved or resized or even selected. This is great for when you have something that’s essentially part of the scenery or if you have image objects text objects that you’re using as a make-shift character sheet.

New UI Themes

By now, you’re probably familiar with EpicTable’s default theme, “Adventure”. While this is great for fantasy and pulp games, it’s not always as visually appropriate for horror or sci-fi. You Shadowrun folks, in particular, made me feel the need to add new themes—not that any of you complained, but I just couldn’t quite bear to see you playing Shadowrun with the standard theme. “Dark Future” is for you.

Adventure

Horror

Sci-Fi

Dark Future

How do I get the beta?

To those of you who have already installed the beta: My apologies–the auto-updater won’t work for this release. My goal is to distribute updates automatically, so you don’t have to visit this site to know that there are updates. Sadly, the approach I’d been using for that has turned out to be less reliable and less flexible than I’d hoped. I plan to replace it before the 1.0 release. In the meantime, I’ll continue to distribute updates in installer form.